This book explores the evolution of early Americans' first ways of making war to show how war waged against enemy noncombatant populations and agricultural resources ultimately defined Americans' military heritage. Grenier explains the significance of Americans' earliest wars with both Indians and Europeans, from the seventeenth-century conflicts with the Indians of the Eastern Seaboard, through the imperial wars among England, France, and Spain in the eighteenth century, to frontier Americans' conquest of the Indians of the Transappalachian West in 1814. This sanguinary story of Americans' inexorable march across the first frontiers helps demonstrate how they embraced warfare shaped by extravagant violence and focused on conquest. Grenier provides a major revision in understanding the place of warfare directed at noncombatants in the American military tradition, and his conclusions are relevant to understanding U.S. "special operations" in the War on Terror.